It seems that Samsungs drives must be updated by the Magician Software that is included with their drives. Unfortunately, this software is Windows only, though their firmware is not updated nearly as often as Sandforce driven SSDs. It might be worth mentioning that there has been an update to their 840 (pro) series as of 2012 December, so as Linux users that should probably be kept in mind when purchasing.

It seems that Samsungs drives must be updated by the Magician Software that is included with their drives. Unfortunately, this software is Windows only, though their firmware is not updated nearly as often as Sandforce driven SSDs. It might be worth mentioning that there has been an update to their 840 (pro) series as of 2012 December, so as Linux users that should probably be kept in mind when purchasing.

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=== SanDisk ===

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SanDisk makes '''ISO firmware images''' to allow SSD firmware update on operating systems that are unsupported by their SanDisk SSD Toolkit. Note that one must choose the firmware for the right ''SSD model'', as well as for the ''capacity'' that it has (e.g. 60GB, '''or''' 256GB). After burning the adequate ISO firmware image, simply restart your computer to boot with the newly created CD/DVD boot disk (may work from a USB stick.

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I couldn't find a single page listing the firmware updates yet (site is a mess IMHO), but here are some relevant links:

Overview

Introduction

Solid State Drives (SSDs) are not PnP devices. Special considerations such as partition alignment, choice of file system, TRIM support, etc. are needed to set up SSDs for optimal performance. This article attempts to capture referenced, key learnings to enable users to get the most out of SSDs under Linux. Users are encouraged to read this article in its entirety before acting on recommendations as the content is organized by topic, not necessarily by any systematic or chronologically relevant order.

Note: This article is targeted at users running Linux, but much of the content is also relevant to our friends using other operating systems like BSD, Mac OS X or Windows.

Minimal power consumption - fractions of a W at idle and 1-2 W while reading/writing vs. 10-30 W for a HDD depending on RPMs.

Light-weight - ideal for laptops.

Limitations

Per-storage cost (close to a dollar per GB, vs. around a dime or two per GB for rotating media).

Capacity of marketed models is lower than that of HDDs.

Large cells require different filesystem optimizations than rotating media. The flash translation layer hides the raw flash access which a modern OS could use to optimize access.

Partitions and filesystems need some SSD-specific tuning. Page size and erase page size are not autodetected.

Cells wear out. Consumer MLC cells at mature 50nm processes can handle 10000 writes each; 35nm generally handles 5000 writes, and 25nm 3000 (smaller being higher density and cheaper). If writes are properly spread out, are not too small, and align well with cells, this translates into a lifetime write volume for the SSD that is a multiple of its capacity. Daily write volumes have to be balanced against life expectancy.

Firmwares and controllers are complex. They occasionally have bugs. Modern ones consume power comparable with HDDs. They implement the equivalent of a log-structured filesystem with garbage collection. They translate SATA commands traditionally intended for rotating media. Some of them do on the fly compression. They spread out repeated writes across the entire area of the flash, to prevent wearing out some cells prematurely. They also coalesce writes together so that small writes are not amplified into as many erase cycles of large cells. Finally they move cells containing data so that the cell does not lose its contents over time.

Performance can drop as the disk gets filled. Garbage collection is not universally well implemented, meaning freed space is not always collected into entirely free cells.

Pre-Purchase Considerations

There are several key features to look for prior to purchasing a contemporary SSD.

Native TRIM support is a vital feature that both prolongs SSD lifetime and reduces loss of performance for write operations over time.

Buying the right sized SSD is key. As with all filesystems, target <75 % occupancy for all SSD partitions to ensure efficient use by the kernel.

Reviews

This section is not meant to be all-inclusive, but does capture some key reviews.

Enable TRIM by Mount Flags

Note: It does not work with ext3; using the discard flag for an ext3 root partition will result in it being mounted read-only.

Warning: Users need to be certain that kernel version 2.6.33 or above is being used AND that their SSD supports TRIM before attempting to mount a partition with the discard flag. Data loss can occur otherwise!

Apply TRIM via cron

Enabling TRIM on supported SSDs is definitely recommended. But sometimes it may cause some SSDs to perform slowly during deletion of files. If this is the case, one may choose to use fstrim as an alternative.

# fstrim -v /

The partition for which fstrim is to be applied must be mounted, and must be indicated by the mount point.

If this method seems like a better alternative, it might be a good idea to have this run from time to time using cron. To have this run daily, the default cron package (cronie) includes an anacron implementation which, by default, is set up for hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly jobs. To add to the list of daily cron tasks, simply create a script that takes care of the desired actions and put it in /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly, etc. Appropriate nice and ionice values are recommended if this method is chosen. If implemented, remove the "discard" option from /etc/fstab.

Note: Use the 'discard' mount option as a first choice. This method should be considered second to the normal implementation of TRIM.

Enable TRIM for LVM

Enable issue_discards option in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf

Enable TRIM With mkfs.ext4 or tune2fs (Discouraged)

One can set the trim flag statically with tune2fs or when the filesystem is created.

# tune2fs -o discard /dev/sdXY

or

# mkfs.ext4 -E discard /dev/sdXY

Note: After this option is set as described above, any time the user checks mounted filesystems with "mount", the discard option will not show up. Even when discard is passed on the CLI in addition to the option being set with tune2fs or mkfs.ext4, it will not show up. See the following thread for a discussion about his: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=137314

I/O Scheduler

Consider switching from the default CFQ scheduler (Completely Fair Queuing) to NOOP or Deadline. The latter two offer performance boosts for SSDs. The NOOP scheduler, for example, implements a simple queue for all incoming I/O requests, without re-ordering and grouping the ones that are physically closer on the disk. On SSDs seek times are identical for all sectors, thus invalidating the need to re-order I/O queues based on them.

The CFQ scheduler is enabled by default on Arch. Verify this by viewing the contents /sys/block/sdX/queue/scheduler:

$ cat /sys/block/sdX/queue/scheduler
noop deadline [cfq]

The scheduler currently in use is denoted from the available schedulers by the brackets.

Users can change this on the fly without the need to reboot by echoing the scheduler of choice like this:

# echo noop > /sys/block/sdX/queue/scheduler

This has to be done as root (sudo won't work) and is non-persistent (eg. change will be lost upon rebooting). Confirm the change was made by viewing the contents of the file again and ensuring noop is between brackets.

Kernel parameter (for a single device)

If the sole storage device in the system is an SSD, consider setting the I/O scheduler for the entire system via the elevator=noop kernel parameter. See Kernel parameters for more info.

Using the sys virtual filesystem (for multiple devices)

This method is preferred when the system has several physical storage devices (for example an SSD and an HDD).

Create the following tmpfile where "X" is the letter for the SSD device.

/etc/tmpfiles.d/set_IO_scheduler.conf

w /sys/block/sdX/queue/scheduler - - - - noop

Because of the potential for udev to assign different /dev/ nodes to drives before and after a kernel update, users must take care that the NOOP scheduler is applied to the correct device upon boot. One way to do this is by using the SSD's device ID to determine its /dev/ node. To do this automatically, use the following snippet instead of the line above and add it to /etc/rc.local:

where SSDS is a Bash array containing the device IDs of all SSD devices. Device IDs are listed in /dev/disk/by-id/ as symbolic links pointing to their corresponding /dev/ nodes. To view the links listed with their targets, issue the following command:

ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/

Using udev for one device or HDD/SSD mixed environment

Though the above will undoubtedly work, it is probably considered a reliable workaround. It should also be noted that with the move to systemd there will be no rc.local. Ergo, it would be preferred to use the system that is responsible for the devices in the first place to implement the scheduler. In this case it is udev, and to do this, all one needs is a simple udev rule.

To do this, create and edit a file in /etc/udev/rules.d named something like '60-schedulers.rules'. In the file include the following:

Of course, set deadline/cfq to the desired schedulers. Changes should occur upon next boot. To check success of the new rule:

$ cat /sys/block/sdX/queue/scheduler #where X is the device in question

Note: Keep in mind cfq is the default scheduler, so the second rule with the standard kernel is not actually necessary. Also, in the example sixty is chosen because that is the number udev uses for its own persistent naming rules. Thus, it would seem that block devices are at this point able to be modified and this is a safe position for this particular rule. But the rule can be named anything so long as it ends in '.rules'. (Credit: falconindy and w0ng for posting on his blog)

Swap Space on SSDs

One can place a swap partition on an SSD. Note that most modern desktops with an excess of 2 Gigs of memory rarely use swap at all. The notable exception is systems which make use of the hibernate feature. The following is recommended tweak for SSDs using a swap partition that will reduce the "swappiness" of the system thus avoiding writes to swap:

SSD Memory Cell Clearing

On occasion, users may wish to completely reset an SSD's cells to the same virgin state they were at the time the device was installed thus restoring it to its factory default write performance. Write performance is known to degrade over time even on SSDs with native TRIM support. TRIM only safeguards against file deletes, not replacements such as an incremental save.

Tips for Minimizing SSD Read/Writes

An overarching theme for SSD usage should be 'simplicity' in terms of locating high-read/write operations either in RAM (Random Access Memory) or on a physical HDD rather than on an SSD. Doing so will add longevity to an SSD. This is primarily due to the large erase block size (512 KiB in some cases); a lot of small writes result in huge effective writes.

Note: A 32GB SSD with a mediocre 10x write amplification factor, a standard 10000 write/erase cycle, and 10GB of data written per day, would get an 8 years life expectancy. It gets better with bigger SSDs and modern controllers with less write amplification.

Use iotop -oPa and sort by disk writes to see how much programs are writing to disk.

Intelligent Partition Scheme

For systems with both an SSD and an HDD, consider relocating the /var partition to a physical disc on the system rather than on the SSD itself to avoid read/write wear.

For systems with only an SSD (i.e. no HDDs), consider allocating a separate partition for /var to allow for better crash recovery for example in the event of a broken program wasting all the space on / or if some run away log file maxes out the space, etc.

noatime Mount Flag

Using this flag in one's /etc/fstab halts the logging of read accesses to the file system via an update to the atime information associated with the file. The importance of the noatime setting is that it eliminates the need by the system to make writes to the file system for files which are simply being read. Since writes can be somewhat expensive as mentioned in previous section, this can result in measurable performance gains. Note that the write time information to a file will continue to be updated anytime the file is written to with this option enabled.

Note: This setting will cause issues with some programs such as Mutt, as the access time of the file will eventually be previous than the modification time, which would make no sense. Using the relatime option instead of noatime will ensure that the atime field will never be prior to the last modification time of a file.

Locate High-Use Files to RAM

Browser Profiles

One can easily mount browser profile(s) such as chromium, firefox, opera, etc. into RAM via tmpfs and also use rsync to keep them synced with HDD-based backups. In addition to the obvious speed enhancements, users will also save read/write cycles on their SSD by doing so.

The AUR contains several packages to automate this process, for example profile-sync-daemonAUR.

Others

For the same reasons a browser's profile can be relocated to RAM, so can highly used directories such as /srv/http (if running a web server). A sister project to profile-sync-daemonAUR is anything-sync-daemonAUR, which allows users to define any directory to sync to RAM using the same underlying logic and safe guards.

Compiling in tmpfs

Intentionally compiling in /tmp is a great idea to minimize this problem. Arch Linux defaults /tmp to 50 % of the physical memory. For systems with >4 GB of memory, one can create a /scratch and mount it to tmpfs set to use more than 50 % of the physical memory.

Example of a machine with 8 GB of physical memory:

tmpfs /scratch tmpfs nodev,nosuid,size=7G 0 0

Disabling Journaling on the filesystem

Using a journaling filesystem such as ext3 or ext4 on an SSD WITHOUT a journal is an option to decrease read/writes. The obvious drawback of using a filesystem with journaling disabled is data loss as a result of an ungraceful dismount (i.e. post power failure, kernel lockup, etc.). With modern SSDs, Ted Tso advocates that journaling can be enabled with minimal extraneous read/write cycles under most circumstances:

Amount of data written (in megabytes) on an ext4 file system mounted with noatime.

operation

journal

w/o journal

percent change

git clone

367.0

353.0

3.81 %

make

207.6

199.4

3.95 %

make clean

6.45

3.73

42.17 %

"What the results show is that metadata-heavy workloads, such as make clean, do result in almost twice the amount data written to disk. This is to be expected, since all changes to metadata blocks are first written to the journal and the journal transaction committed before the metadata is written to their final location on disk. However, for more common workloads where we are writing data as well as modifying filesystem metadata blocks, the difference is much smaller."

Note: The make clean example from the table above typifies the importance of intentionally doing compiling in tmpfs as recommended in the preceding section of this article!

Choice of Filesystem

Btrfs

Btrfs support has been included with the mainline 2.6.29 release of the Linux kernel. Some feel that it is not mature enough for production use while there are also early adopters of this potential successor to ext4. Users are encouraged to read the Btrfs article for more info.

Ext4

Ext4 is another filesystem that has support for SSD. It is considered as stable since 2.6.28 and is mature enough for daily use. Contrary to Btrfs, ext4 does not automatically detect the disk nature; users must explicitly enable the TRIM command support using the discard mount option in fstab (or with tune2fs -o discard /dev/sdaX).
See the official in kernel tree documentation for further information on ext4.

XFS

Many users do not realize that in addition to ext4 and btrfs, XFS has TRIM support as well. This can be enabled in the usual ways. That is, the choice may be made of either using the discard option mentioned above, or by using the fstrim command. More information can be found on the XFS wiki.

JFS

As of Linux kernel version 3.7, proper TRIM support has been added. So far, there is not a great wealth of information of the topic but it has certainly been picked up by Linux news sites. It is apparent that it can be enabled via the discard mount option, or by using the method of batch TRIMs with fstrim.

Firmware Updates

ADATA

ADATA has a utility available for Linux (i686) on their support page here. The link to the utility will appear after selecting the model.

Kingston

Kingston has a Linux utilty to update the firmware of their Sandforce based drives. It can be found on their support page.

Mushkin

The lesser known Mushkin brand Solid State drives also use Sandforce controllers, and have a Linux utility (nearly identical to Kingston's) to update the firmware.

OCZ

OCZ has a command line utility available for Linux (i686 and x86_64) on their forum here.

Samsung

It seems that Samsungs drives must be updated by the Magician Software that is included with their drives. Unfortunately, this software is Windows only, though their firmware is not updated nearly as often as Sandforce driven SSDs. It might be worth mentioning that there has been an update to their 840 (pro) series as of 2012 December, so as Linux users that should probably be kept in mind when purchasing.

SanDisk

SanDisk makes ISO firmware images to allow SSD firmware update on operating systems that are unsupported by their SanDisk SSD Toolkit. Note that one must choose the firmware for the right SSD model, as well as for the capacity that it has (e.g. 60GB, or 256GB). After burning the adequate ISO firmware image, simply restart your computer to boot with the newly created CD/DVD boot disk (may work from a USB stick.

I couldn't find a single page listing the firmware updates yet (site is a mess IMHO), but here are some relevant links: